Matthew d'Ancona: Get a grip on the referendum genie — it’s out of the bottle

Friday’s vote on EU membership will remind voters that neither party leader has yet taken ownership of the issue

Wednesday 3 July 2013 11:12 BST

No winner: Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband have failed to see their party’s popularity increase in the last month (Pictures: PA)

Tomorrow, the Prime Minister will host a barbecue for Conservative MPs: a summer celebration symbolic, in the words of one aide, of “the family coming together”. Barely a week after the fabulously contrived “row” over George Osborne’s choice of take-away, burgers will once again acquire political significance.

This briquette bonding session will be followed on Friday by the vote on James Wharton’s bill paving the way for a referendum on EU membership. Having topped the ballot of MPs that allows him to introduce his own legislation, Wharton adopted the draft bill already prepared by Cameron but not included in the Queen’s Speech. The Tory leadership has obliged with a three-line whip.

This is emphatically a Conservative initiative, not a Coalition measure: Danny Alexander, the Lib-Dem Chief Secretary, may be George Osborne’s vicar on Earth when it comes to spending cuts, but on Sunday he loftily dismissed the referendum bill as a “parliamentary stunt”. Denied Government time — private member’s bills are restricted to Fridays — Wharton’s proposal stands only a modest chance of becoming law. It is also vulnerable to filibuster.

Yet this is less important than its political symbolism. In the past year, the fissure between Cameron and the Conservative Parliamentary Party has become both wide and deep. The row over gay marriage was in large measure a proxy battle over the PM’s perceived indifference to his MPs’ opinions. When Andrew Feldman, the party co-chairman, reportedly referred to Tory activists as “swivel-eyed loons” — words he denies using — many backbenchers assumed that he was talking about them, too.

Worst of all, Cameron’s speech on Europe in January, promising a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU by 2017, was greeted in Tory ranks with scepticism as well as applause. In May, 114 Conservatives voted against the Queen’s Speech in protest at the exclusion of a referendum bill.

Cameron’s robust support for Wharton is a conciliatory measure, intended to heal these tribal wounds. In truth, it will take more than a hot dog and a private member’s bill to soothe the colicky parliamentary party. These grievances between the Conservative leader and his MPs date back to the expenses scandal of 2009. But the Wharton bill is a significant confidence-building measure — a signal by Cameron that he takes his MPs seriously — and has been interpreted as such.

For this very reason, those outside the Tory tribe agitating for an In-Out referendum are worried that the whole idea will become ineluctably associated with the Conservative Party — and duly contaminated. In Monday’s Guardian, John Mills, the Labour donor and chair of the Labour for a Referendum group, complained that “the Conservatives have chosen to make their bill all blue … the referendum bill now looks more like a Tory PR operation than a genuine movement for constitutional change”.

Labour, of course, knows all about that: Jim Callaghan famously described the 1975 referendum as “a rubber life raft” into which the whole party could clamber. But Mills has a point nonetheless.

Cross-party co-operation is the foundation of all success in referendums — both in ensuring that they happen and in winning them. To secure a vote on electoral reform at Westminster, the Lib-Dems needed Tory support. To win the AV referendum, the “No” campaign had to secure a substantial chunk of the Labour vote — which it did, thanks to the campaigning genius of Matthew Elliott, founder of the TaxPayers’ Alliance and now chief executive of Business for Britain (a group of which John Mills is co-chairman). Michael Gove’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, was formerly campaign director of Business for Sterling — the proto-campaign established in readiness for a referendum on the euro that never came — and used to fret that the toxic Tory “brand” would contaminate the Eurosceptic case.

That brand is not as toxic as it was. But the logic still holds good. If the proposed In-Out referendum is perceived as no more than a Tory wheeze, it stands less chance of happening and of being taken seriously.

One can scarcely blame Cameron for this. He is not responsible for the respective reaction of Labour and the Lib-Dems to the Wharton bill. At the time of writing, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg are still committed to abstention on Friday. Though the Lib-Dems proposed an In-Out referendum in their 2010 manifesto, this pledge was to be triggered only when Britain “signs up for fundamental change in the relationship between the UK and the EU”. Clegg is privately convinced that no such treaty is on the horizon. So his position is more internally consistent than you might suppose.

Miliband’s position is more provisional and vulnerable though he has so far resisted calls for a referendum. Last year, he was urged by Ed Balls, Jon Cruddas and others to commit Labour to a referendum, stealing a march on Cameron, who was evidently heading towards such an announcement. Their case was sound: be first, take ownership of the idea, make the PM look as though he is matching you rather than vice versa. This cohort of ruling Labour figures — many of them alumni of Gordon Brown’s bleak academy — are much less emotionally drawn to the EU than the Blair-Mandelson generation.

In private, most shadow Cabinet members admit that Labour will have to offer some sort of referendum pledge in the 2015 election, lest the campaign be reduced to Cameron asking Miliband every day why he is “running scared of the voters”. But the form and timing of that undertaking remain undecided.

Mills complains that the Conservative Party has hijacked the referendum and — in so doing — made it less likely that such a vote will happen. But the real problem lies on his own side. As Osborne tells allies, “the referendum genie is out of the bottle”. The sooner Miliband accepts and embraces that political fact, the greater will be his role in deciding the character of this momentous vote, its timing and the rules of engagement. For now, Cameron keeps a firm grip on the political barbecue. Who can blame him?